1. Copyright Notice
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material that is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent files or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever. The following notice applies to the software and data as described below and in the drawings that form a part of this document: Copyright 2007-2014, Sanah, Inc., All Rights Reserved.
2. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to data processing. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to data processing and distribution of unstructured documents.
3. Related Art
An enterprise often needs to process documents from 3rd parties for the benefit of the customers or patients of the enterprise. The enterprise can be a health care provider, government agency, corporation, organization, or other commercial, non-profit, charitable entity, or the like. These documents can include invoices for services rendered by a 3rd party, medical/dental lab results, referral information, insurance information, and a variety of other documents the enterprise can use to render service to its customers or patients. Additionally, the enterprise may need to forward or distribute documents to 3rd parties for the benefit of the customers or patients of the enterprise. These documents can include prescriptions, care directives, requests for lab tests, invoices to insurance companies, and the like. This flow of documents into and out of the enterprise can be cumbersome and error-prone, especially when the documents are unstructured. Unstructured documents are collections of information, the components of which are not readily distinguishable by computer processing means. A document coded in conventional Portable Document Format (PDF), a file format created by ADOBE SYSTEMS, INC., is an example of an unstructured document. Other examples of unstructured documents include text documents, faxes, emails, image files, video/audio files, and the like. Other document formats can include bit mapped format, binary format, Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) format, Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), Tagged Image Format (TIF), Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) format, and Rich Text Format (RTF).
Some solutions offered by conventional document processing systems include defining standardized forms for submittal to the enterprise. However, a broad level of standardization of forms is very difficult to implement. Other conventional solutions, for example, use a managed health care network, wherein 3rd party providers must become subscribers prior to submitting documents to the enterprise. Special software is used in a proprietary network to transfer documents. Still other systems use conventional email systems or website downloads to transfer documents to the enterprise. However, such systems are not secure and may not comply with the requirements of governmental regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
United States Patent Application No. 2003/0074248 discloses a means for an enterprise, such as a health care facility, to receive messages from any one of a plurality of disparate, ancillary vendor applications, convert the vendor information to an enterprise usable form and then store the enterprise information on an enterprise database. The enterprise keeps vendor specific rules for converting each vendor's information to enterprise information. Additionally, relational enterprise rules are applied to the enterprise data stored in a enterprise database, so as disparate vendor information is converted to enterprise data, the relationships between that converted enterprise data are checked with the enterprise data stored in the enterprise database. Enterprise data can also be directly entered into the enterprise database from enterprise system clients, the relationships between that enterprise data are also checked with the enterprise data stored in the enterprise database.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,664,109 discloses a central medical record repository for a managed health care organization that accepts and stores medical record documents in any format from medical service providers. The repository then identifies the document using information automatically extracted from the document and stores the extracted data in a document database. The repository links the document to a patient by extracting from the document demographic data identifying the patient and matching it to data stored in a patient database. Data is extracted automatically from medical records containing “unstructured” or free-form text by identifying conventional organization components in the text and is organized by executing rules that extract data with the aid of such information. Documents for a patient are retrieved by identifying the patient using demographic data.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,082,538 describes a secure messaging system that encrypts an electronic document using a symmetric key and transmits the encrypted document and related message parameters to a recipient whose identity is then authenticated by a web server. The web server dynamically regenerates the symmetric key from a hidden key and from the message parameters accompanying the encrypted document, and thus avoids having to maintain a central repository of encrypted documents as required by typical “post and pick-up” encrypted messaging systems. Further, an audit trail provides time-stamped message digest data for a plurality of time intervals, where the message digests for adjacent time intervals are computationally linked together. The audit trail effectively enables time-stamped message digest data to verify not only the existence of a document during a first time interval, but also to verify the existence of documents encountered in a prior time interval.
Thus, an improved computer-implemented system and method for processing and distribution of unstructured documents is needed.